NARP Blog

Friday, July 30, 2010

For the past few decades, city boosters in Charlotte, NC, have wanted the Queen City to become more like Atlanta—taking advantage of its location to become one of the Southeast’s premier business hubs. Now, when it comes to modern transportation, it’s Atlanta that is looking enviously towards Charlotte.

Both locales, like all medium- and large-sized US cities, had streetcar networks early in the 20th century. But while Atlanta does have the 30-year-old MARTA heavy rail transit system, it lacks modern streetcar or light rail lines. Charlotte, meanwhile, opened its first light rail line in 2007 and has plans to greatly expand the system. Just this week, Charlotte’s City Council agreed to accept a $25 million federal grant to build an east-west streetcar line to connect with the north-south LYNX light rail line. There are some plans afoot to build new rail transit lines in Atlanta, and a funding application was made in February for a streetcar on Peachtree Street, but Georgia has yet to receive any federal grants for transit.

And it’s not just transit—intercity passenger rail has a lot to do with it as well. Charlotte is connected to Greensboro and Raleigh by six daily Amtrak round-trips, with two daily round-trips linking it to the Northeast Corridor—a link that the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor aims to solidify. Credit for this can be given to the state of North Carolina’s decades of planning and investment, while Georgia has spent next to nothing on trains, the result being that Atlanta is served by only one daily Amtrak train in each direction and high(er)-speed rail is a much longer ways off.

This has Atlanta business leaders worried that the metro area, which is suffering from worsening traffic congestion and deteriorating transit service, may be losing jobs to cities like Charlotte. MARTA and its connecting suburban bus systems have the dubious distinction of being the only urban transit system not to receive state funds—they are funded primarily by a 1% sales tax levied only in the counties they serve. This left these systems particularly vulnerable to the effects of the recession on sales tax revenue, resulting major service cutbacks. Yet the Atlanta area remains far behind in the competition for federal transit dollars because its planning process is not as far along as those of Charlotte and other cities.

Hopefully the success of Charlotte’s rail transit investments in catalyzing smarter development—aided by better intercity train connections—will finally persuade Georgia’s political leaders to get serious about passenger rail. Not only are trains (and buses) an essential lifeline for those without access to cars, but they are the most proven way to combat crippling congestion while creating jobs and desirable places to live and work—places centered on people, not cars.

—Malcolm Kenton

Friday, August 27, 2010

As the Recovery Act-funded Milwaukee-Madison high-speed (110-mph) rail line (currently undergoing environmental review) becomes a contentious issue in the Wisconsin governor’s race, our friends at the West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition and the Empire Builder Coalition show the arguments of the train opponents to be “based upon incorrect data and misplaced assumptions.” For example, Republican candidate Scott Walker’s claim that “nobody really knows how much [HSR] will cost” completely overlooks the reams of documentation that the project’s sponsors have made public. Walker also chooses not to consider the economic benefits that the trains are sure to provide once they’re running, only the relatively small amount of engineering and construction jobs the project creates directly. Former Republican elected officials are also weighing in favoring the trains.

The Nashville Tennessean, a daily newspaper whose editorials have been critical of passenger train investment in the past, came out with one defending the newly-proposed high-speed service between Nashville, Chattanooga and Atlanta. The editors wisely caution against passing conclusive judgments on a project that is still in the early planning stages, point to the success of new Amtrak services elsewhere at wooing new riders, and frame the issue as a matter of staying competitive with other states and countries. Let’s hope this more enlightened attitude persists.

Mobilizing the Region provides good insight into the changing mindset of the “rails-to-trails” movement, which has always had an uneasy alliance with passenger train advocates over the tension between maintaining rail-trails as such and returning them to railroad use. It is encouraging that many rail-trail advocates see trails as part of the transportation network that can coexist side-by-side with active rail lines that will likely host more trains over time. Green-space preservationists should be natural allies of rail advocates in pursuit of a higher quality of life.

Investigative reporter Bruce Selcraig has a worth-reading examination of the current state of American passenger rail in the respected Miller-McCune Magazine. Selcraig compares Amtrak to the frequent, reliable service that the people of Spain take for granted, even if they don’t live in a major urban area. His conclusion: “Overall, high-speed rail is far more cost effective than its opponents claim. And high-speed rail could become a significant part of America’s transportation mix with far less investment than has been poured into highways and airports.” While he gives somewhat short shrift to the value of incrementally improving existing train service as opposed to going all-out for a “man on the moon” project, Selcraig reiterates, “Perhaps passenger rail will have to be subsidized by the government, not unlike our Social Security, NASA, thousands of libraries and fire departments and all our roads and airports.”

LCL: Federal Transit Administrator Rogoff helps break ground for a new intermodal train station in Rhode Island that will become the southern terminus of MBTA’s Providence Line commuter trains from Boston. * * * The OneRail Coalition’s latest blog posts highlight jobs being created in the railroad industry. * * * Transit doesn’t just enhance livability in urban and suburban areas. * * * The Transport Politic has a useful map of applications for the next round of federal high-speed rail funding ($2.3 billion). * * * President Eisenhower makes a post-mortem pitch for high-speed rail.

—Malcolm Kenton

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Friday, July 30, 2010

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Friday, August 27, 2010

Posted by Malcolm Kenton

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